Antarctic sea ice still at record high — where is springtime melt?

Whatever happened to polar amplification?

The oceans are apparently warming, and yet the sea-ice abounds in the Southern Hemisphere. A new record was set at 19.57 million square kilometers of ice [NSIDC-nrt], around one million more than the usual amount. (Yesterday ice covered 19.11m km2).

The size of the sea-ice surrounding Antarctica is spectacular. We can just see the outline of the landmass here to appreciate just how much of the Southern Hemisphere is covered with sea-ice right now.

Temperatures at the South Pole show 30 years of climate sameness. These are satellite recordings of temperatures in the air over Antarctica (70S – 60S).

…

I see Paul Homewood has also noticed this record. He points out that the peak this year was Oct 1, which is ten days later than the usual Sept 22 peak. He also notes that the global sea-ice is above normal, even though Arctic Ice is lower than usual.

What does this peak in sea-ice mean? It means the media are not telling us the whole story. Do we suppose they would be so quiet if the ice was hitting record lows?

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143 comments to Antarctic sea ice still at record high — where is springtime melt?

Is there some way we can measure the density of the ice as well? (I just know the alarmists will come back with some argument about there still being less of it, just more dispersed or something like that).

On a more sarcy note – maybe Trenberths missing heat is under the ice and was cooled by it?

I know this looks like me trying to get in near the top of the Comments list, but on this occasion, I just couldn’t help it when I read what MadJak says here:

On a more sarcy note – maybe Trenberths missing heat is under the ice and was cooled by it?

I can see the headlines now, when, after that notorious missing heat has moved from the surface, to the Atmosphere, to the Upper Troposphere, then into the Oceans, and is now hiding in the weally weally deep oceans, and each time it hasn’t been found, it’s moved, you know, like in a game of chasey.

Well, when they finally find that, hey, it’s not in the deep oceans after all, MadJak nearly has the correct answer right here.

It’s not hiding under the ice.

It’s actually hiding ….. inside the ice.

You know, based entirely on our dear friend BilB’s fridge analogy, and hey, wasn’t that a classic.

Don’t laugh at the alarmists Tony. The bloke from Brisbane Ice Supplies (who provides the party ice that we buy at servos) tells me that his biggest cost after wages is electricity.
It takes a lot of energy to make ice, and we know the earth atmosphere system is harboring heaps more energy since the globe warmed due to mans emissions of fossil fuel gasses, soooo…..

THAT IS EXACTLY WHERE TRAVESTY TRENBERTHS MISSING HEAT HAS GONE. TO MAKE ICE DONTCHA KNOW.

Stop me if I’m wrong here but I always thought that when you freeze water a lot of heat comes out of it, not goes into it. The problem your ice making friend has is that he’s pumping the heat uphill against the temperature gradient and that indeed takes a lot of energy. But when water freezes naturally it gives up that heat to its surroundings without any energy input to the process.

So where indeed is the (supposed) missing heat? Could it be in Trenberth’s head?

In respect of the sheet or land ice at the Antarctic its thickness is measured by the GRACE satellite which has had some problems with Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA), which means as the ice gets thicker it presses further down on the bedrock and can produce a longer signal from GRACE giving a false ice loss result. The results therefore about ice thickening have been mixed with some problematic conclusions and possible funny business.

Just accept that there is no missing heat. it’s because the climate models are a giant fraud. There is no significant CO2-AGW. There was some AGW from Asian aerosol pollution reducing cloud albedo, but it saturated about year 2000.

A Carbon Tax of AUD $45 million transformed Virgin Blue from a profit to a loss-making enterprise last financial year. Ditto or worse for his other airlines. As far as I know, none of Branson’s major business ventures have made solid profits for a few years now. In fact, most of them have been in the red for a while now.

I think when the end comes, it will be quite spectacular – sort of the Entrepreneur’s equivalent of Enron.
Like Bob Ansett but on a global scale.

But Jo,
any warmist “knows” that global warming causes more ice to form (when there is more ice) and causes it to melt when it does.

Global warming make the Earth hotter or colder.
Global warming causes more or less cyclones and other storms.
Global warming causes droughts or floods.
Global warming causes starvation to poor wee timorous cowering beasties like 2 metre 900 kg polar bear to be stranded on small ice floes near convenient photographers. Proof? No pictures available of these creatures swimming off for a 100 km. or so trip to more hospitable areas.

Indeed warmists are discovering all sorts of unusual effects of Global warming these days.

But you will confuse the simpleminded (like Bilb, Blackbladder etc.**) because the relevant line above is red. If they can’t tell the difference between heating and cooling, a colour change will be beyond them.

** I’ve just read Michael the Realist(?)’s latest comment and I deliberately left him out of the list of those who have a mind of any sort.

Personally I’ve never been that concerned about Arctic ice. As John Wayne would put it if he was around “Arctic ice has got to do what arctic ice has gotta do”.

After all it melted quite extensively in 1800 to 1830 and in the 1930′s when (according to the official adjusted records) the temperature wasn’t rising. What I find curious is that those official adjusted records, which are heavily biased towards the northern hemisphere lands, are showing a very slight temperature rise in the last 15 years, despite the increasingly colder winters in those same lands. (And colder weather in other parts less well served by those records).

IPCC-related scientists have repeatedly argued that greenhouse gas forcing would cause surface warming and ice melting in both north and south polar regions. There is no a priori reason to suggest that increasing atmospheric CO2 would cause Antarctic sea ice extent to increase, and in fact, this circumstance contradicts the IPCC’s climate model projections. It is a welcome advance that the IPCC now acknowledges the facts relevant to this matter (NIPCC, Chapter 5).

5. “There are … differences between simulated and observed trends over periods as short as 10 to 15 years (e.g., 1998 to 2012)” (SPM-10); “there remains low confidence in the representation and quantification of [cloud and aerosol) processes in models” (SPM-11); and “most models simulate a small downward trend in Antarctic sea ice extent, albeit with larger inter-model spread, in contrast to the small upward trend in observations” (SPM-11).

It is inconceivable that anything the IPCC says will have relevance to anyone but themselves, the UN and mesmerised governments. ‘Relevance’ only occurs when what they say results in further institutionally sanctioned “green” taxation, further polices resulting in primitivisation and impoverishment, further seasonally related mortality and morbidity, further entrenched third world poverty, further erosion of science by the process of green totalitarian politicisation, and the further development of global governance by unelected and unelectable bureaucrats.

The IPCC is a sausage making machine. Science supplies a selection of good meat some of it capable of making very good sausages. However much of this is rejected and not used. After chopping and washing and watering down the meat, this is fed into the machine with a heavy selection of political oats and greens to produce in the end an absolutely vile sausage.

The post normal mind believes if you don’t talk about it, it does not exist. This right after they believe if you name something according to what it isn’t, it becomes what it isn’t. In other words, reality does not exist outside of and is created by their miasma of foggy intent, whim, and fantasy.

Yes this is very good news – it will help keep the Greenpeace activists away from the Antarctic, at least those protesting about “retreating sea ice” – but of course they should still protest about the “whale culling” in this region for so called “scientific research”. Hopefully those Arctic Greenpeace activists, when released from their freezing Russian prison cells within the Arctic Circle, will engage in “useful protests” such as the Antarctic whale issue and also convince the Greens Party in Oz that “prescribed burning of our eucalypt forests” is a good thing and not a bad thing. Fire fighters keep telling us that “prescribed burning” of our Oz eucalypt forests is essential. Surely this strategy would have helped reduce the severity of the disastrous fires this month in NSW and earlier this year in Tasmania.

And just wait until the Sun gets very very lazy during the next GM – the Arctic & Antarctic sea ice will just keep expanding and expanding, and the “Warmists” will have nowhere to hide. As I have said earlier this is when the “Warmists” will require therapy as they withdraw from their “denial phase”, that is after the mainstream media starting putting the boots into the “Theory of AGW”.

The Enginer
Your’e far from alone in thinking that they must be missing something with the Sun and its variations and the consequent effect on the planet’s climate.
There is an increasing number of papers and articles which using historical temperature data, historical records. proxies for both climate and solar output that are all pointing to the Sun having a very large and major role in past climatic changes.
And they all have hypothesis as to how and why the Sun affects the climate and possibly weather as it seems to. But in reality they have almost no real clues as to what are the still hidden and unknown Sand only guessed at solar influences that are mainly responsible for driving the global climate and the changes that occur in our climate.

One observation is that when we do get these sometimes slow, sometimes rapid climate shifts, the tropics don’t seem to vary a great deal in temperature . But the higher the latitude ie; closer to the poles, the greater are the changes or in CAGW parlance, polar amplification.

The increase in temperature contrasts between equatorial regions and polar regions during times of climate cooling are the reasons why, during past cold episodes like the Sporer, Maunder and Dalton minimums, there was a much higher incidence of severe storms and weather in the higher latitudes and those storms and weather events were stronger and more extreme during those low solar activity, cold climatic episodes.

Conversely during a warm climatic period such as at the present when polar and equatorial temperature contrasts are not so wide then the numbers and intensities of weather and storm events are much reduced.

It’s all pretty simple in theory, just that the physical and theoretical detail is horrendous in it’s complexity.

The whole global weather and climate system is really only an attempt by Nature to equalise energy across the planet.
It is entirely an energy driven system including both latent energy as in heat and kinetic energy as in the enormous masses of moving water and air which themselves are the result of heat energy differences between one mass of water and another mass of water.
Those masses of water and air have a very large inertia’s which accounts for delays, sometimes of years before the effects of a change in solar energy inputs and therefore a change in the energy levels is actually observed in some or many climate linked phenomena.

Energy will always try to equalise so so we see flows of warmer water towards the poles from the equatorial regions where most of the available incoming solar energy is absorbed by the equatorial water and equatorial region’s land masses. From there the basic flow direction is outwards towards the polar regions or are caught up in feeding into areas and masses of colder water and therefore water with a lower heat energy content in an attempt to again equalise energy content across those masses of water.
Or even higher velocity flows penetrating into slower waters and air masses and again attempting to level and equalise the energy content in the total mass of water or air involved by mixing or even almost rejecting leading to stratified flows of warm and cold water or air at different and separate levels.

Strangely I have seen vast amounts of verbiage on the physical, observable phenomena that supposedly impacts on and drives the global climate but have seen nothing on the energy flows, the real drivers of the global climate.

Map the [ enormously complex ] energy flows around the planet, both latent and kinetic energy and you will have a map of the main drivers of the global climate expressed as the actual physical drivers of the climate.

Then it remains to sort out the actual impact the changes in the solar energy inflows and the outflows of heat energy into space to see how the planet’s internal energy flows and therfore it’s weather and climate systems are changed. altered and modified by solar inputs and solar changes in those solar energy origin inflows of energy into the planet.

. As the solar energy input flows and the outflows of energy into space vary minutely in measurement but vary by immense magnitudes by amount, that goes a long way towards explaining how the whole climate has not equalised it’s energy levels across the planet over the billions of years past.
And so this planet has always had weather and climate of varying intensities.

Which incidentally has forced life to adapt to those fast and slow and irregular changes in climate and weather and ocean temperatures which i believe has been one of the main drivers in forcing the planet’s biosphere to adapt and through the pressures of adaption has led to steadily increasing levels of intelligence of which we, Homo sapiens are the latest but very far indeed from the final product in the intelligence stakes if there is ever such a thing as a final product in Nature.

Plus of course, the constant changes in solar energy inflows to different parts of the planet due to the fact that with a tilted axis of rotation relative to the planetary orbit,ie summer and winter and everything in between, the solar energy inflows keep changing on different parts of the planet throughout the year. Which also prevents an equalising of energy ie temp[erature and water mass flows across the planet and gives us what we call weather and climate.

When the poles are warmer there is less energy flow towards the Poles as Nature tries to equalise heat energy across the planet.
With less intense poleward flows of air and water, there are much weaker and much less intense weather events .

Conversely when the poles are colder, a more intense energy flow towards the colder. lower energy Poles in the form of water and air masses and greater contrasts between the water and air masses respectively create conditions for a fast and furious attempted equalisation of energy between the systems. And so during cold climate episodes the storms and weather events are much more severe.

If you want to see this in historical terms i would suggest the fascinating and excellent 2000 year long weather and climate history of the British Isles Metindex, put together by a UK meteorologist

And personally I think the adding together of the mean temperatures of thousands of different
places – and then to homogenize them with collective corrective analogies leads to loss of clarity – not
greater accuracy.

Interestingly on Weekend today show this morning they had National Geographic Photographer and Environmentalist Jason Edwards on promoting a competition for Voice For Antarctica, http://www.airnewzealand.com/voiceforantarctica/ so you get to travel there and assist Jason in raising awareness of the terrible impacts of Climate Change, rriiiggghhhttt………
The strange thing was during the entire interview AGW/CAGW was not mentioned once, and obviously the facts presented in this thread abut sea ice growth in Antarctica were ignored also.

I volunteer Rereke Whakaaro to apply and go undercover as a warmist/spy to gather information and undermine warmist activities.
Sorry mate but it’s your bloody airline supporting this crap.

Qantas just missed a mountain top near Canberra some years ago because the crew managed to offset the holding pattern in the FMS while waiting for the Air Traffic Controller to get out of bed to turn on the runway lights. There’s also the infamous Thai golf tour – straight to the course.
I know a fair number of airline pilots and quite a few aren’t all that tightly wrapped.

O/T but just want to let ROM know – i left a response to your take on the Microgrids’ idea on the “Smile, there is one less wind farm in the world” thread, including a bbc docu on metal theft in britain, which u might find interesting.

re this thread, i would like to update something. the fox weather channel 10-day forecast temps for 15 and 16 Oct of 36 & 39 degrees respectively turned out to be 26 & 27 degrees. since i started posting these outrageous forecast temps, i’m finding the 10-day forecasts are showing no extremes, just the usual mid- to late-20s we get this time of year. in fact, it’s been quite cool at times….nice.

That would be because soot only travels north.
…
Using computer models and information from NASA satellites, scientists located significant accumulations of black carbon soot in the Arctic region.
Soot from South Asia is more easily transported to the North Pole than soot from other parts of the world.
Of the atmospheric soot found above the Arctic, about one-third comes from South Asia, which is estimated to have the largest industrial soot emissions in the world.
These findings were recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

The Arctic ice sheet is also recovering faster than it has done for many years.

This, and the behaviour of the Antarctic ice sheet report here, should be embarrassing for alarmists, but facts have never got in the way of their beliefs, as they are routinely ignored, or ‘homogenised’/manipulated/tortured.

The answer obviously lies in the Trans Global, Deep Ocean, Multi-Oscillating, Trans Gender Current which has risen to the surface at the poles and transferred all their heat to the deep ocean abysses. Remember, you first heard it here.

Polar amplification works both during heating and cooling cycles, sudden shifts in the balance of heat flows into and out of the earth system, the create ebb and flow of the Ice sheet size, as extra heat is moved from the equator toward the poles.

As the peak inputs are now going away the ice is coming back to cover the open water to limit the continued heat loss, there is a sea ice cover heat regulating thermostat mechanism (from the insolation of the thickening sea ice cover) that helps to stabilize the climate effects toward the poles.

The thunderstorm generation along the tropics starting earlier in the day when the sea is warmer, and later in the day when cooler stabilizes the input side through cloud albedo mechanisms, that regulate the upper limits of the normal range of climate extremes.

I have a thoroughly sceptical mind, therefore as someone with contrarian DNA I like to try to construct reasons to logically demolish my own reasoning. One thing that struck me three years ago was the divergence of melting in the Arctic and freezing in the Antarctic and the lack of any scientific reasoning to explain it (to a Mann the wafflings of pseudo-alchemist Climategate Team don’t count).

However, one hypothesis worth looking at is the combination of the difference in land masses, the industrial (aerosol and heat) output and the albedo (in summer) of the two polar regions.

If mankind does have any influence then it will be in the Arctic, with the Antarctic as the natural baseline.

In the first article in Live Science they say this,
An expedition aimed at making the first crossing of the Antarctica continent on skis during the pitch-black winter has been called off due to a compounding of technical difficulties and the team’s arrival at apparently highly dangerous terrain, according to a release from the expedition, called The Coldest Journey.

Good grief, these Alarmists don’t even admit it was too cold to continue, they blame the terrain and the equipment. It’s getting colder down there guys, you made 300 kilometers in 180 days with a target of 3,800 kilometers in 145 days.

This one statement sums up their attitude towards CAGW – believers.

They still can’t admit it was too bloody cold.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is likely to have the most significant impact because of its likely effect on climate change (IPCC, 2007). Emissions to air can contribute to the greenhouse effect both directly and indirectly and may also affect air quality and the snow surface. In response to this, all activities will be planned to minimize fuel use; vehicles will be will be new and maintained to the highest standard to give the maximum possible fuel efficiency; the expedition will ensure regular maintenance of vehicles and equipment as this is the best method of minimizing emissions of carbon oxides, black smoke and unburned hydrocarbons; clean, filtered fuels will be used to minimize emissions.

Amazing they didn’t mention biofuel as in whale oil. Bunch of wankers.

The key thing to note is that Antarctic ice maximum occurs while the sun is well above the horizon and rising higher each day, while the Arctic minimum occurs when the sun has pretty much set permanently below the horizon for winter. So the net effect on global Albedo is positive. More energy is reflected out into space. I’m not sure how big the figure is nor how it compares to other variables like cloudiness – but it’s certainly something the alarmists never mention.

Chilli, I have my suspicions that because of the angle of incidence of sunlight on the poles it would make little difference between Ice or water regarding albedo. I believe the energy reflected would be pretty much the same and I am willing to take a few million to prove it. I don’t like my chances though

Your own Prof. Bob Carter subject to heavy defamation on a BBC radio prog where only greens were allowed to comment on the subject of “whether skeptics should be banned from the BBC”
- “This geologist should not be allowed to comment” ..”big oil”, “denier nutcases” etc. etc.
Discusssion on Bishop Hill
(one of the speakers owns a green energy corp, but this was not mentioned)

Meanwhile, Steve Jones, who is “only a geneticist, not a climate scientist”, was treated on the same programme as a not-to-be-questioned authority on matters climatic. This may have something to do with his regular paeans of praise for the BBC’s “wonderful, unbiased” science output, of course.

Why do you say the oceans are apparently warming?
See the global cooling trend since 2003 in Figs 6 and 7 in the latest post at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
This post also gives an estimate of the timing and extent of the coming cooling. Here’s a brief summary.
1 Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 – 0.15
5 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 – 0.5
6 General Conclusion – by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial – they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent – with a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.

I have a question I would like answered. Ive looked for email addy’s etc in vain to ask it so please excuse if it is off topic in this particular thread.

Sea level is relevant to temperature as elevation rises right ? As a rule the higher you go the cooler it gets etc based upon sea level (at the time)and the reverse is true as well.

I am wondering that if, with all the proxy temperature records (unadjusted, adjusted, readjusted reinterpreted and adjusted again etc etc etc) if the proxy temperatures are actually interpreted for the corresponding sea level in the geological timeframe and place that they are taken from ?

EG: Say a tree is relied upon for evidence as a proxy to state that the temperature 2000 years ago or say 15000 years ago at X geological place on the map was Y, is the relevant sea level at the time taken into account as well ? Would it make a difference if the actual sea level at the time the tree was growing was a hundred or five hundred meters higher or lower than it is today ?

Sorry once again for being off topic but it is a question that has been bugging me given the vast temperature changes found between traveling from the coast up to the top of the range here in north Queensland. Fives degrees C in a couple of hundred meters vertical really makes a difference.

So is this effect taken into account when we read a proxy temperature record ?

It would be my guess that the historic proxies (which are mainly based on tree rings etc.) would not have taken relative height above sea level into account. I am not even sure how you could estimate height above sea level, given the possibility of tectonic displacement, continental uplift, etc.

Sea level height is not taken into account in tree ring proxies.
The tree ring proxies are very wide in their interpretation of past global temperatures and there is a great deal of critiscm of the dendrologists for their claims of accuracy which cannot be sustained in practice.
The real problem is that because of the wide range of interpretations of tree ring chronology let alone interpreting temperatures from those rings, the widths of which are highly subject to rainfall and the position on the tree from which the cores are taken for interpretation, is to use some very heavy smoothing of the data unless it suits the particular dendros to do otherwise.
Climate alarmists aren’t alone in twisting data to suit their core beliefs.

Something as fine as the impact of changing sea levels and the [ assumed ] consequent changes in local temperatures from the effects of the changing sea levels is just simply impossible to calibrate and measure and in any case such fine measurements would be and are just smoothed away in the statistical analysis and presentation of the data.
Tree ring chronology and interpretation; ie dendrochronology is primarily a statistical exercise over which there is some considerable controversy amongst other scientific circles and disciplines.

The fast track course to having even a basic or a lot less level of knowledge even than that for me was to try and keep up a few years ago with Steve McIntyre’s exposure of Mann’s Hockey Stick fraud on his Climate Audit blog and it’s reliance on just one of just six Siberian trees from right up against the northern limits of the Arctic tree line from which the rings were taken that Mann used as his historical basis, the flat blade for most of the Hockey stick followed by the severe uptick based on the ring interpretation of this one Siberian tree.

It’s all there on Steve Mc’s Climate Audit site but it’s a bloody hard read for a non academic.

Somewhere in there Mann also used the data from the Bristle Cone pines which he was told to never use because the data was just rubbish and also the verves from a Swedish lake where there had been a large turnover of deposits due to modern activities which had destroyed the sedimentary layers from which he suposedly derived some other Hockey Stick supporting data.

WUWT also ran a few posts on this but Steve Mc I think it was christened that single Siberian tree with the very large uptick that statistically and severely warped the whole tree ring sequence into a large statistical up tick in recent global temperatures, as “the most influential tree in the world”

Sea levels varied from +9m 120,000 years ago to -125m 20,000 years ago (and the variations are much less over the last 2000 years that we are looking at for tree rings). Given the tree heights above sea-level, most of the time I don’t think it would make any difference, especially, as ROM says, given that tree rings are already affected by rainfall, plus soil fertility etc. The noise is just too high.

Briffa’s tree was Yamal 06 (I wrote about it here). I was up til about 3am. I did the plaque for the tree…

I had no idea you were the original artist for that plaque! When I do a TinEye search it does indeed show your website as having the oldest reference to that picture, on or before 2009-12-29. I probably first saw it on WUWT or somewhere similar. I recall it being a real hoot back in the day.

Now while it is not my place to say this… … I would vote for Suraya getting a “Star comment” award for asking such a good question. Questions are the beginning of a journey.

Stalagtite cores and ice cores don’t need sea-level adjustment because their 18O/16O ratio depends on the temperature of water that evaporated off nearby lakes and oceans, which for the most part means its off the ocean. So the cave stalactite (or ice core) oxygen ratios measure the ancient sea-level temperature regardless of the cave (or ice surface) altitude.

Tree rings though, yeah why not.
There might even be a paper in it for some budding ARC supplicant. Correct land-based proxies for height AMSL to predict what the MSL temperature probably was.

And their graph is quite revealing. South east asia has been getting drier since 1800, and just by eyeballing it… the effect of post-WW2 industrialisation is…erm…non-existent.
Again, don’t tell that to The Hockey Team.

OTOH this other paper says that tree ring 18O is determined most by the maximum temperature of rainy summer days, not by average year-round temperature, and “We stress that trends in maximum temperature series for this time of the year, like trends in oxygen isotope ratios series from tree rings, are completely different from trends in yearly mean temperature“.
So it may be too noisy to get a decent temperature proxy out of trees no matter which way you slice `em.

…We do not ban writers whose views suggest they are climate change deniers or sceptics. We consider their letters and arguments. But we believe the argument over whether climate change is happening and whether it is man-made has been thrashed out extensively by leading scientists and on our pages and that the main debate now is about its effects, severity, and what society does about it.

Climate change deniers or sceptics are free to express opinions and political views on our page but not to misrepresent facts. This applies to all our contributors on any subject. On that basis, a letter that says, “there is no sign humans have caused climate change” would not make the grade for our page.

The oceans are apparently warming, and yet the sea-ice abounds in the Southern Hemisphere. A new record was set at 19.57 million square kilometers of ice [NSIDC-nrt], around one million more than the usual amount. (Yesterday ice covered 19.11m km2).

Now you tell me, cos honestly I am at a loss here, being just a dunderhead Pommie but who TF is in denial here? I guess imho – it’d be the Sydney Morning Herald…………………?

I think the ‘evidence’ they must be referring to is that carefully crafted statement by the IPCC. Acknowledge that 0.35deg of warming in 100 years having ‘probably’ been caused by humans, and so what ? Just don’t confuse it for evidence, but go with , just to take the wind from their sails, as who was it that suggested on an earlier thread ?

The growth in Antarctic sea ice is interesting. Reading up on obliquity I see that the point where the suns rays are strongest where they strike the Earth are effectively moving North by 14 to 15m per year, so that would lead over time to a colder Antarctic and more sea ice.

I wouldn’t have thought though, that 15m a year would account for the growth rates seen. Gerard Roe did some work on sea ice and came to the conclusion that rate of change was a better match. And as the planet’s rate of change of obliquity is currently at about its highest then perhaps there is some sort of tie up there.

We are getting near the mid point of the range that obliquity covers and at least one commenter on WUWT thinks that that midpoint is where glaciations start, not sure that’s necessarily right though. But then again we have had 11,000 years of interstitial. On the other hand if the entry into the next glaciation follows Milankovic, more or less, then it should be so gradual that we’ll probably never identify any point in time as the start.

Yes of course. The sea ice is in fact a mirage fooling the satellites caused by lots of heat. Like seeing a water mirage in the desert or a water mirage on the road in the summer. Quick, someone tell Trenberth we found his missing heat.

No wonder Captain Cook never found Antarctica. He tried several times but never even got close due to the sea ice. If he had followed the sea ice edge in an easterly direction, he might have come across the antarctic peninsula at the southern end of the Drake passage. The current keeps the passage open. However he made his deep southern forays east of New Zealand, where the sea ice is much wider,

I believe there are Maori legends that claim one of the great legendary Maori leaders sailed their canoes south until they reached the edges of the southern ice pack.
A hell of a feat if true but they were a bloody tough lot of B’s those Maori’s as all the Kiwis still are when it comes to that.

I’m quite interested like I am in any history so any expansion or comment on that Maori legend please Rereke Whakaaro?

19 Oct: UK Financial Mail on Sunday: John Rees: Power plant deal leaves the UK handing £90bn to France and paying DOUBLE the going price of electricity for 35 years
President Francois Hollande will be rubbing his hands with glee this week when the British Government is expected to sign a deal on nuclear power that could funnel £90billion into French coffers.
The agreement with French state-owned EDF Energy will create a price the Government guarantees will be paid for the electricity generated. This is likely to provoke fury as it is twice the market level.
Osborne last week announced plans to allow Chinese firms to take a minority stake in Britain’s nuclear power industry. But remarkably, even after that announcement, the Department of Energy issued a terse statement saying the exact terms of the deal with EDF were ‘still being negotiated’…
The Government appeared to have made promises to the Chinese before agreeing the guaranteed price with the French, though it refused to comment on its apparent blunder.
Critics say the Government found itself ‘over a barrel’, with the French and Chinese the only bidders left offering to build two nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point in Somerset – the first in the UK since 1995 – at a price of £14billion…
With the inflation-linked price per megawatt hour likely to be about £90, many are questioning whether this is too much or simply what Britain must pay to keep the lights on and meet environmental targets…
The Government strongly denies that it is a subsidy. If it were, the whole deal could fall foul of European Union rules against state aid…
But as coal-fired power stations are forced to close to meet EU climate-change rules, the UK’s spare capacity in the electricity market is predicted by the National Grid to be as low as 5 per cent this winter, which compares badly with an average of about 15 per cent in America…http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2467475/Power-plant-deal-leaves-UK-handing-90bn-France.html

Just to be clear, this is a deal to get EDF, the French Generator that already operates in England, to build new Nuclear Power stations in England, as no-one else seems go want to. In the meantime, until they are built, yes Britain will be paying through the nose to import electricity and gas from its Continentsl neighbours.

Damn and I heard a nasty rumour that the POMMs were supposed to be pretty good at financial affairs. In light of this news Pat, Nigel Farage might be totally incorrect about the British finance institutions

But hey, lets wrangle over AGW, which appreantly …”If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow, the average temperature of the planet’s not going to drop for several hundred years, perhaps over 1000 years.”

The Antarctic continent and it’s surrounding ocean areas are a pretty interesting item,
The Great Southern Ocean which completely surrounds the Antarctic continent is given as the fifth largest ocean on the planet and in my sources seems to be defined by the bounds of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current
It is the only ocean that connects to all of the world’s major ocean basins and is consequently one of the sources of many of the cold water currents that feed into other ocean systems and thereby seriously influences global weather systems.
i would argue that the great Southern Ocean extends as far north as the 45 th or 50th degree of latitude which would place it around fourth largest ocean on earth.
45 degrees South runs through the lower part of NZ’s South Island and and through the lowest quarter of Argentina and Chile.
[ 50 degrees north runs along the US/ Canadian border, south of the UK and across the north of western Europe, through central Asia, Mongolia and northern China / Manchuria ]

Antarctica to a considerable extent is cut off from the world’s major weather systems and the ocean’s which control those weather systems by the Antarctic Circumpolar current.
A mass of water in this immense Circumpolar Current takes about two years to circumnavigate the entire Antarctic continent, Embedded in the Circumpolar Current are four nodes, two of each of alternating warmer and colder water masses. These mases of colder and warmer waters are also characterised by raised domes or depressions of some quite large amounts as in many centimeres of sea level detecteable through the satellite Sea level systems.
The cold and warm pools take about 8 years to circumnavigate the Antarctic continent. They actually move from east to west against the flow of the circumpolar current but are still carried eastwards by the current.
A good site to read up on this is the ;Surface Currents in the Southern Ocean The Antarctic CP Current

There are two major impediments to the uninterrupted passage of the Circumpolar current around Antarctica.

They are the Drake Passage, the relatively constricted but deep water gap between the tip of the South American continent and the Antarctic Peninsula and the SW Indian Ocean submerged now for the last twenty million years, micro continent, the Kerguelen Plateau

In the case of the narrow Drake Passage, also the location of the famous Cape Horn, immense amounts of cold Antarctic origin waters are diverted by the land mass of South American continent, north up along the continent in the Peru current. This cold water current which is very rich in biological terms and therefore one of the world’s great fisheries, turns west below the equator in what is sometimes called the Humbolt or South Equatorial current.
It then flows westward across the Pacific and to the south of the equatorial ENSO regions until in the mid to eastern Pacific it again turns south and breaks up into smaller currents which are still immense in size and mass and which sometimes revert into a number of large ocean gyres, a rotation of water mass almost vortex like where energy is conserved in the semi isolated water mass within the gyre.

When the Circumpolar current makes it’s way into the Indian ocean after passing through the Drake Passage it’s flow is then impeded by the now submerged Kerguelen_Plateau in the SW Indian Ocean which is marked today by the French possession of Kerguelen island and the Australian possessions of Heard and McDonald Islands.
[ A paper on this only appeared a few months ago ]
The downstream deep water vortices and turbulence on an immense scale created by the Circumpolar current having to flow around and over this plateau obstruction leads to further large masses of cold water from the CP current being diverted into the lower depths of the Indian Ocean from where it may in fact affect the phase of the IOD and therefore our seasonal rainfall here in southern Australia.
Being highly unstable in flow characteristics in such vortice inducing situations, it becomes damn hard to predict the way and the amounts of deep cold water flows and where and how much they may intrude into other ocean areas from the effects of this Kerguelen plateau obstruction to the CP current flow .

[ I had a fair bit to do with the problems inherent in predicting fluid flows in turbulent air streams when designing and building a large mobile vacuum cleaner type clover seed harvester with a 14 foot wide vacuum pick up, a fan that required 200 HP to drive and generated 18,000 CFM at 30 inches of water gauge air pressure as the actual vacum fan . And believe me even air does things you wouldn't think possible when you have high flow rates in confined situations let alone what large volumes of water do in turbulent flows. ]

Thats the ocean barriers to the Antarctic interacting to any great extent with the rest of the world’s weather systems .
The atmospheric barriers are far more dispersed but still exist primarily as the near stratospheric Southern Annular Mode [ SAM ] or otherwise called the Antarctic Oscillation [ AAO ]

The SAM when it’s index is negative moves further north and pushes our southern Australian weather systems that transverse the Bight or south of the Bight, further north thereby affecting our southern Australian weather systems and patterns.
There is also a theory kicking around which I have the paper somewhere on the hard disk from some years ago that the SAM’s phase influence reaches all the way north to northern Australia during the summer wet season.
When positive index, the SAM has moved south and the southern weather systems travers the Australian region further south which in turns leads to less winter rainfall from the further south frontal systems and consequent drier winter conditions and some down in the mouth farmers as they see the season slipping away

A couple of other quick items on the Antarctic continent.
The Antarctic Plateau made up mostly of ice of course with the thickest Antarctic continental ice being some 4,770 metres [ 15,700 feet ] thick, is about a 1000 kms across and has an average altitude of some 3000 metres [ 9800 feet ]

[ The Tibetan Plateau in contrast, the great global weather modifying high lands of Asia has an average elevation exceeding 4500 metres [ 14800 ft.] and is a 1000 kms wide by 2500 kms long.]
Because of the altitude of the Antarctic plateau and the extreme cold. the Russian manned Vostok station has recorded the lowest temperature observed on Earth at minus 89.2C, there is a constant flow of extremely cold dense air from the centre of the continent down slope, a katabatic wind flow [ well known to glider pilots . Not to be caught in when slope soaring ] towards the oceans surrounding the Antarctic Continent.

This katabatic [ katabatic = greek for "to go down" ] flow of very cold dense air from deep within the continent to the surrounding oceans is one of the prime factors leading to the creation of and constancy of the great ice shelves [ The Ross Ice shelf is about the size of France. The Ronne- Filchner ice shelf about the size of Spain ] and the winter formation of sea ice around the continent.

The high Antarctic plateau has been very slowly cooling over some 50 years of observations so perhaps we are actually reaching a so called tipping point in Antarctica where the very slowly reducing temperatures reach a critical point where a significant or major phase change in the Antarctic climate seen in the form of now rapidly increasing sea ice areas around the continent and it’s lead in effects on the rest of the global climate come into play.

The very thing so fearfully played up by the CAGW alarmists but with the opposite sign on the temperature trends which will upset them no end as another great CAGW alarmist myth is destroyed .

If so mankind may be in deep trouble but we will wait perhaps only another decade before know the truth of the Antarctic and perhaps the global climate situation.

Ah yes that reminds me S66 here in the back blocks of nowhere (South Australia) the CFS brought in this new scheme last year i think to “alert” the masses as to when a bush fire “might” occur. So the night before they would designate the next day a level the highest level meant the schools would be closed and children had to stay at home although it was strongly suggested the people in a certain area should leave (get a motel room somewhere else or stay with a friend).

Now remember this is the day before and this is even when there was no actual fire its just in case by some chance a fire did actually start. The problem was there levels of catastrophe were set so low that we had 3 of these “alerts” in the first week after everyone got the shits up they relaxed the criteria a bit but still we were told doom, death and destruction could happen any day in reality we had not one major fire for that year, in fact it has been several years since a major fire (Pt Lincoln being the last one i believe).

yesterday i heard these fires were called “monster” fires so i ask what is worse a mega or a monster i vote monster.

The ridiculous tale that I heard was that the “warming ocean” causes more ice to melt, which creates a layer of very cold water at the surface which then re-freezes more readily (because its fresh water).

Wirtschaftswoche also expresses surprise that Antarctic sea ice is near record highs and that cyclones are not growing in frequency, and that the IPCC only mentions extreme weather frequency on the very fringes of its report.

That’s Funny Handjive, I believe Lord Christopher Monckton had those five items on his list and had trouble getting a lecture hall.

I have little time for these people quickly recanting since they were the leaders of the pack when this nonsense first came up. I hope they really mind because I wouldn’t buy their little weekly if it were the last mag on earth.

But he/she/they tended to comment in his/her/their lunch time. So apart from him/her/them stealing the Australian tax payers computing cycles and bandwith, and in toeing the official propaganda line, I was not at all fussed by it. Not my taxes.

I find it kind of nice that they red thumb me, its like a mark of respect in that they wont debate anyone because they know they will face utter defeat so they just meekly red thumb every comment we make in a vain attempt to engage.

Tim,
Well it all starts with the failure of communism and a bunch of commies feeling like complete and utter numb-nuts (quite deservedly).
Then you take their agenda and find a the next vehicle for the realisation of their ideals.
Then you send people off to universities to study science (instead of whining about lentil supply). You can then get them to prepare a whole bunch of scary scientific noise about everyone burning, and the oceans swallowing up the universe, l;entils being in short supply etc etc. Add a failed ex VP of the US and get him to throw together some agit propoganda – including an animated drowning polar bear just to pull on the heart strings.
And finally, as your models fail to predict anything of value, just get your said plants in universities to come up with a vast number of unprovoable hypothesi to try and explain that even when they were wrong, they were right and that the cooling is because of the warming etc etc.
Of course remembering how said nutters felt when communism was shown to be the load of trabant infused horse manure, they will do almost anything to try and ensure that all those people who took a political stance so strongly over a flawed message don’t end up feeling like the wallies that they are.

I am sure some warmist can claim that the warm oceans have achieved self realisation thanks to mother gaia, and that the warmer particles have become so agitated they’re able to remain under the ocean until the time to strike comes…..

Gosh, an inverted hockey stick of Antarctic sea ice extent proxy turning down in 1958 right on schedule with Mauna Loa CO2!
I guess we better extrapolate that indefinitely into the future, eh?

While the predicted decline in Antarctic sea ice extent has not been observed to date it is quite possible that changes in thickness may have occurred without detection.

Hey you were right BilB, it is more balanced! They admit they were wrong!
Will you ever achieve such a level of balance?

That’s 2 pages of science and 17 pages of “wot-if” scenarios. Their explanation for why the Antarctic would be gaining ice while the Arctic was losing it is to just mumble something about wind speed increasing in the southern ocean due to a pressure drop. No explanation for how that is linked to global warming. Still doesn’t disqualify natural forces from being the cause of warming. It could all be happening naturally due to solar magnetic activity being at a historically unusual Grand Maximum in the late 20th century.

How times and Antarctic sea ice cover and science and public attitudes have changed in those 6 years as the Great Catastrophic Global Warming Scam continues to disintegrate before our eyes!
The rats are already fast abandoning the launched in 1988 and just 25 year old leaking, stinking, sinking, alarmist ship.
Only the cockroaches remain.

Probably a bit late but i was looking for something else and then followed a few links and found this site and this post with it’s Antarctic station temperature graphs, Antarctic continent stations map and etc.

The well known USA’s Amundsen / Scott base at the South Pole and the Russian’s Vostock base are the only continental interior Antarctic bases and both are located on the 3000 metre altitude Antarctic plateau from which the extremely cold dense air streams down slope, ie; katabatic winds to the continental edges and it’s extensive ice shelves and surrounding sea ice fields.

All the other international bases are located on the edges of the Antarctic continent which incidentally is about 1.8 times the size of Australia so it’s big!

In the temperature graphs Vostok base is showing a very slight trend rise in December temps otherwise the mean annual temperature trend is quite flat. ie; there is no trend either way.

At the Amundsen-Scott base at the South Pole, the mean annual temperature trend is flat but with an overall fall of about three degrees in July temperatures as observed over the 50 years of observations.

The Continental edge / ocean bases all have somewhat more variations but other than the Antarctic Peninsula bases, they also have quite flat trends in mean annual temperatures over the last 30 to 50 years as can be seen in the graphs on this site.

At the Cape Denison [ Mawson ] headquarters of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14, the average year-round wind speed was nearly 80 km/h, and in June and July the average speed was an astonishing 120 km/h. This earned the cape the name ‘Home of the Blizzard’.

Such winds are caused by a combination of the cold of the interior, the domed shape of the continent and intense low pressure systems around the coast. For long periods – often many days – large amounts of dense, cold air slide at an accelerating rate down the coastal slopes of Antarctica’s ice sheet, reaching hurricane force (around 120 km/h) by the time they reach the sea. Maximum gusts can be more than 250 km/h – equivalent in force to Tropical Cyclone Tracey which destroyed Darwin in 1974.

These winds, called ‘katabatic’ winds, are common throughout the world wherever there are high, cold places, but nowhere are they as ferocious as Antarctica’s katabatics. So as well as being the coldest, Antarctica is also the world’s windiest continent.

Following are two descriptions of a severe blizzard experienced at Mawson in 1960, which blew for 42 hours and wrecked both of the station’s aircraft:

The blizzard was one of the worst ever experienced at Mawson, and was associated with a deep depression in the Southern Ocean. The barometer fell to 27.9 inches. Hurricane force winds bore down on Mawson and the ice plateau behind the station. Gusts at Mawson were as high as 116 mph, with the wind blowing for hours at about 80 mph. Up on the ice plateau nearby, at the airfield, they were estimated to be even higher. Some idea of the force of the hurricane is given by the fact that during the attempted rescue operations, men were lifted bodily into the air and thrown yards away to slide helplessly over the ice until rescued. Only the prompt action of men in holding on to each other prevented others being blown away with the wrecked parts of the Beaver aircraft which they were trying to save…

This is very interesting as going by the HadCrut4 data, the SH temprature anomaly is lower than that for the NH by about 0.3 degrees which is the largest gap since the record began ( average is about 0.1 and varies usually between 0 and 0.2). The implication is that the SH is a bit cooler than the NH and getting cooler and possibly the driver of the ‘pause’. That said it looks like the NH is doing pretty well in delivering snow and stuff early and strong this year.

This might also explain the manic, panicked over reach by Mr Bandt, the UN hat talker et al regarding bushfires etc. It all sounds like the loony stuff coming from the KRuddster in the dreg days of the last Federal election campaign.